Dead Man Talking

A Dialog with Tom Parmenter

In late 2013, Tom Parmenter died. But... he got better.

Following a serious cardiac event, he was in the hospital, comatose, for a long stretch. But he came back.

In July of 2016 we had dinner together, and I recorded our conversation, and had it transcribed.
For better or worse, I did as much (or more) talking than he did, but it felt like a thoughtful conversation.

What was it like being dead? Well I hardly noticed. Coming back was very slow. It took a lot longer than I realized at the time. Your sense of time is corrupted so when it actually happened, I had no clue what was going on and-- I was trying to think when I heard, when I had died. I can't remember that.

Kirk:

Oh, the first time back. It was a cardiac event right? Just kind of lights out?

Tom:

Well it was a complete shut down of cardiac events- the last cardiac event. I went to the hospital, then I was in a rehab hospital for a couple of weeks, and then went back to the hospital for a third ... or whatever. It was pretty much in a day you spent. A few weeks of rehab and then back to Mass General for an hour.

Kirk:

So when they talk about death, is that mostly about brain death measurement or how are they gauging it?

Tom:

I think that it was 'heart wasn't beating'.

Kirk:

All right. Just as simple as that.

Tom:

They didn't even let me breathe on a mirror.

Kirk:

You had a really good response with the EMS people.

Tom:

Absolutely. Literally two minutes. I don't know what happened, whether they took me to Newton Wellesley and then straight on downtown or...

[Interaction with Server]

Kirk:

You were saying good response with EMS, two minutes. In general, would you say you're not much of a spiritual man or not a -

Tom:

Not at all really. I don't pound on the table about being an atheist, but...

Kirk:

Right, right.

Tom:

There's enough going on in this world to keep me entertained, I don't need to worry about the next world.

Kirk:

Personally, I guess getting the idea of living on poetically. It seems like a lot of people who are looking to a supernatural explanation, for at least a big chunk of them, part of it feels the whole 'life ever after thing'. Which I think you can do at best, poetically. On the text here you mentioned, "Who wants to live forever?" There's a good book, I forget who by but it's called "The History of the World in Ten and a Half Chapters". The final chapter is a fun take on one version of the Christian afterlife, which is pretty much like here but a little bit nicer and you get more choice of the details of it and it's forever.

It's point is that no matter how nicely pleasant it is and how many conversations you have with Gandhi and MLK Jr or whoever you arranged or whatever or how much you perfect your golf games until every shot is a hole in one, just because you have a millennia to perfect it, eventually you get bored. I think that's the fundamental takeaway: we're just finite creatures not designed for that.

Tom:

People say they want to live forever but I don't think I do.

Kirk:

I think too the whole world ... You always want to be a responsible citizen and worry about the next generation and the future of the planet, and understand that repetition is the best way that nature knows infinity, it's the way it makes more - and you want to respect that but on the other hand, I think when you know and accept the limit, suddenly a lot of problems are less problematic in terms of what you have to worry about.

Tom:

Recently I've been aware of, "Oh, I don't have to worry about that." All of these future events are off the table and really don't have any interest for me. Once I'm gone, I hope I'm remembered, but...

Kirk:

Have you overcome ... I think a lot of people naturally feel scared. It's just naturally ...

Tom:

No, It doesn't scare me at all. It wasn't scary the first time, I don't think it'll be scary the last time. The thing you're afraid of is lingering, locked in syndrome or something like that, or a painful, slow death. I have reason to believe I won't have a painful or slow death so I don't worry about that - just dying? Not at all.

I'm alive, I've been alive a long time. I've done a lot of things. I'm still alive, I'll still do some more but do I really need to go to New York? A bucket list ... The universe in a grain of sand has always been my motto and there's as much interesting going on between your toes - particularly if there's sand there - as anywhere else.

Kirk:

Yep.

Tom:

I've enjoyed the places I've gone, I have happy memories, all sorts of things, but, no.

Kirk:

I really respect that outlook. I find it very natural. Sometimes I'm worried it's just because -

I know for me, I sometimes worry ... I have that problem where I limit the goals I set for myself because I don't want to fail - so I've sort of cultivated that 'find the low hanging fruit' and if I spin it a little bit too much I can make it a Daoist kind of thing, this I'll find that uncarved block and find that natural course and that's where I find strength. The negative view of it is No, I just find it safer to not try and to not fail than to try and fail because the results the same, and I feel better about myself.

Tom:

Setting realistic goals helps you from failing, and if you achieve everything you try, you're really not trying hard enough, I think. Continual incremental improvements on whatever it is that you're hacking out of life makes a lot more sense to me than saying, "I want to be a millionaire" or whatever.

Kirk:

Yep.

Tom:

It's very strange. I mean, my house is worth a million dollars more than it was than I bought it. No big plan or anything, I just moved into it, bought half of it, bought the rest of it and it's shooting up. I bought it with a partner and then bought him out but when we bought it, it was $318,000 and now it's $1.3 million. It's all for Dave and Dan, that's not for me.

Kirk:

Wow. From $318,000 to a million plus? What'd you say the current ... It doesn't really matter. I'm just trying to put the scale in the order of magnitude you're talking here.

Tom:

It was a reasonable price for a young guy to put into a house. And now it's a really expensive house.

Kirk:

Have you had singular messages you'd want to share with the world or future generations or things that you think it took you a long while to get the hang of, that you'd want to tell other people?

Tom:

I'd have to think about that. A message to the future. A lot of things that everybody knows but that they don't follow through on: don't lie to people, things like that just seems obvious. The older I get, the more good the good advice sounds. Byt I think I always knew it was good advise but the older I get the more sense it makes to follow and guide us.

I know of part of your being dead practice, experience, that I always love ... Tell me again the music that brought you back.

Tom:

Basically my brothers brought in a cassette player and played "Shake Rattle and Roll" by Big Joe Turner - far and away my favorite song. It has been since it was a hit. The big thrill for them was that I was hitting the beat even though I was unconscious. That meant to them that I wasn't going to be a drooling idiot when I did come out of my coma, and I wasn't.

Kirk:

Before that you were pretty unresponsive in general, right?

Tom:

Yeah. I think so.

Kirk:

It reminds me there's a famous story, I think Mel Blanc and I think the doctor thought to ask him, "Are you there Bugs?" And he's like "What's up doc" and got that response and that was where they ran from there.

Tom:

I don't know about Dan. David's never watched my TED talk. He says that someday I may watch it... He's old.

Kirk:

Has music always been an important part of your life?

Tom:

Always.

Kirk:

I know you as the drummer emaratis from JP Honk... what other kind of things have you done as an audience or performer?

Tom:

Performer mostly. Well, audience too. My mom and I, I grew up in South Georgia and I heard drinkin' wine spo-dee-o-dee drinkin' wine mop, mop last night and I remembered that she and I used to listen to that together.

It's a great song and I really loved it and still do. This is in South Georgia and a radio program called Jack the Bellboy - he was a white guy but it was a rhythm and blues program so I was always into music. From the time I was ... Well that was a hit when I was 6.

Yeah. You said you're Georgia boy, right? How did you get to the north east?

Tom:

Just lucky, I guess. My folks didn't think you should go to school in the same place where you grew up.

Kirk:

There's some smarts there.

Tom:

I went to Perdue, I grew up in South Georgia and went to Perdue. I went there because they had engineering and they had a good English department. It turned out that the English department was important for me, more important than the engineering. It was funny. My dad said, "Well you just made the reverse decision that I made." He loved to write and so forth, but he was an electrical engineer. As he used to say, "I was an electrical engineer when you could get electrocuted doing it."

Kirk:

It's interesting. I have a slight parallel with me, in my case Tufts, without much of a plan. Well maybe English, maybe an English teacher, they have a good education and a good English program there. Then to dodge a math class, dodge calculus specifically. I started taking a computer science class instead, and it turns out that's what kind of clicked so I kept the double major. I do appreciate that understanding both worlds. In your working days, what kind of careers did you have?

Tom:

I wrote for the school paper and then I graduated and went to Chicago because that was the big city, that's where you were supposed to go. I looked for places, once famous place called the City News Borough in Chicago and that was a cooperative, local AP as it were, and we did all of the grunge work of suicides and murders and car crashes and all that sort of stuff. Then I ended up -

Kirk:

What years were those in roughly?

Tom:

62, 63.

Kirk:

Distant times.

Tom:

Yeah, very distant. It was basically minor league training for working for a paper. I ended up at a paper called Chicago's American which was a former Hearst paper owned by the Chicago Tribune. Used to say it was housed in the left wing of the Chicago Tribune building - but it was an afternoon paper. Afternoon papers are more sensational than morning papers. They don't have afternoon papers anymore.

That was the deal, you'd get street sales. It's definitely a more sensational journalistic environment. I worked there and a lot of these guys were legendary journalists. Harry Romanoff, a city editor he had been the night city editor since the 20's or something. A long time. He could talk a tan off a bathing beauty.. just so... You really had to sort of be corrupt to be employed, because poking into people's private business and so forth. I remember one night I was talking to someone who's husband had died and said something about "I'm sorry to disturb you at a time like this" and she said "I wasn't sleeping anyway..."

I did that for several years and I decided that if I was going to be a writer, I really ought to learn to type, two finger typist, I never developed to four finger, the fancy way. I went to the YMCA college in Chicago to learn to type and being back in a classroom just really flipped my switch. I said, I want more education. I'm not done being educated.

I went to Washington University to study Social Science, political science actually. That was a one year program and part of it was working for this magazine called Transaction, which was aiming to be the "Scientific American" of social science, the goal of the mag, so I worked on that for awhile, several years. One year, I was a scholarhip and they liked me and gave me another year. I never completed a masters degree because I knew I wasn't going to get a PhD and I thought I didn't want a masters degree with short sleeves at graduation so I just did two years of graduate study.

Where did I ... Washington University ... I can't remember how I got from there to here. In the early 70s I was attempting to be a freelance writer but my real problem was I was not really interested in what I was doing and wrote too long, too much, did too much research, all of that.

Kirk:

I tell you, it's funny when you talk about that, lately, I've been into digital photography for awhile, since the mid 90's and I've been going back the past couple weeks and decided to pick out twelve of the most interesting pictures from each year. I find it very empowering because it's very easy to lose your sense of place as years go by, as years become decades and you're like, "Man, what was 2011 about?" There's an entire year of life, 365 days, it's more than we think. Our monkey brains just get lost in the pattern and forget that everyday is -like you were saying - the universe in a grain of sand kind of thing. Once you have those little grains of sand in a row they all start to look alike if you don't pay attention but it's interesting hearing, too. You're sharing some of your history and you're like, "Oh there's the 70's" - and oh I feel kind of old, but that's when I was being born.

Tom:

Just have a way of taking off on this, flip the gears again- It was a long time ago. After I had been there for a couple of years I got a job offer at a program of science and technology at Harvard, as a researcher associate or something like that. And they were doing exactly that. The impact of technology on society.

Kirk:

What year was this around roughly?

Tom:

This would be mid 70's. That was very challenging. I met a lot of smart people. Again, still aware that I was not an academic at heart anyway.

Kirk:

It's so funny. Sometimes I feel like children of the 70s and 80s, we kind of feel like we invented technology somehow or first became aware of its ability to change us culturally, but so much happened [before] - from Airplanes to the telephone system to radio to all these things and it's funny. Today I was looking at a video of "how it's made" for tennis balls. It was fortuitously timed because I happened to have noticed a dog-eaten tennis ball on the side of the road, you could see its guts a little bit and I was like, "Wow"... if for some reason if there's some major sad societal disruption and you couldn't get fresh tennis balls? People who like tennis would miss them, and it's true, when I saw this video it's this amazing process of ... It's still very manual, we don't have robots over everything. It's still some guy whose job is to take all the balls out of the mold and turn them the right way and all this stuff. I was surprised that it wasn't more automated...

There's some quote that says, "Without technology even a pencil is a miracle" and I think it's really easy to take that for granted about how much mechanical engineering has gone on in the world to make it as manufactured as it is.

Tom:

Thoreau's family business, pencil manufacturing.

Kirk:

Perot, the politician?

Tom:

Henry David.

Kirk:

Oh I thought you said Perot, the guy with the ears and the Texas... Yeah, it was ... I don't know. Almost akin to the printing press - obviously different but still a very enabling technology that just let people ... So many of these things are just part of our lives and we don't even think of them as interesting.

Tom:

Yeah. Well certainly the program was sponsored by IBM and I challenged the boss and I said, "It's basically blood money, right?", he said, "Yeah, we're paying for what they did."

Kirk:

I see. An agenda. I was trying to remember if that was during the IBM "Think" days, they had these little plaques, reminder to think.

Tom:

I did that for awhile.

The next great experiment was being a freelance writer and I think that's how I started. That's how my wife got into working. I wasn't making much money and she needed to do it to. That was stimulus for her.

We were married 50 years and 8 days. A lot of things that might have happened didn't happen but it's all taken care of. She had a stroke and I took care of her.

Kirk:

She was incapacitated?

Tom:

Yeah, pretty much. Eventually, definitely. She never got any better. She eventually got worse. We loved to laugh so there were lots of things that were funny about having an incapacitating stroke, if you haven't had one or dealt with it, you don't know what it is but we had a good time.

Kirk:

I tell you, my dad had a incapacitating seizure when I was 14 or so. I think I understand the power, the sort of enabling, appealing pleasure of black humor in situations. The one I remember from him was ... He has been an RN, he hadnt practiced as an RN but he was actually thinking about a career switch and he got his RN degree, fairly shortly before he had a stroke. His first official diagnosis was "Huh, you have spinal menangitis, I guess your farts don't smell" not realizing that no, he'd actually lost his sense of smell entirely. We were all able to disabuse him of the notion that the symptom of spinal menangitis is farts not smelling. It is that kind of very dark humor and having to roll with it.

You have how many kids?

Tom:

Two kids, three grandchildren ... I remember once, Ann was basically just lying there, staring at the ceiling in the hospital, less than 24 hours away from dying, the visiting nurse said, "How are you today?" and "Fine!" was her cheery response. That was her attitude toward life.

Kirk:

How long was it between the stroke and her final passing?

Tom:

Death.

Kirk:

Death, I know, I'm using euphemisms already, it's hard. How long between the stroke and death?

Tom:

Five years.

Kirk:

Five years, wow.

Tom:

Two years of it she's going to get better, three years she's not going to get better. We kept our thing going... Sorry, it's asentimental thing to think about.

Kirk:

I saw that one picture of her, the glowing one. She seemed like a really special person.

Tom:

She was. Her sister in law always thinks of Ann as sitting and smiling, a pretty happy person.

Kirk:

...Not that this is his story but your brother also made it somehow from Georgia to the northeast too.

Tom:

Well... my brother Jim, my little brother, came up here. My other brother the one I live with now lived all over, San Francisco, rich life experience. I don't know how either one of them ended up here. It must have something to do with me.

Kirk:

You were here first?

Tom:

Yeah.

Kirk:

Great. Do you tend to get sentimental about the idea of having kids, something you decided you do or the decisions that make themselves?

Tom:

Well, Jim doesn't have any kids. My brother Dave has 2 kids. He's on good terms with one of them, he's not on good terms with the other. He can be sarcastic and sardonic sometimes, paid a price for that, but I'm close with his kids. David started having kids ... Until the first few years, one of them was out in California was teaching, one of them teachin in Minnesota, I'm not in as close touch as I was.

Having kids was a very natural thing for me. I had lots of expectations. The one time I worked at Harvard.

Well I listened to a lot of music all my life, I played in a little band in my dormitory at college.

Kirk:

Drums or something else?

Tom:

Drums. Nothing much came of that. I got away from it for awhile and then all of a sudden the 60s came along and everybody was having a band and I just ended up in a band.

Kirk:

So playing the full set, drum set?

Tom:

Drum set, yeah. I could keep a good beat but I never practiced as much as I should have and playing rock and roll, keeping a good beat was pretty much all you needed to be able to do. It was called Velocette after the motorcycle because it was a single cylinder motorcycle and the business cards said 'single cylinder rock and roll'.

Kirk:

I like that. That's nicely humble. It's better to under promise and over deliver than the reverse.

Tom:

The opposite of "Yes". We were real low rock and roll.

Kirk:

That's cool. I know that feeling of never practicing enough. My excuse was always playing tuba in six bands at once. Two or three at school, two at church but also, I think sometimes, the rhythm section, if you're not going to make a full time living at it, you can kind of coast a little bit. You need to have certain strengths and ability to pull that group together and be that heartbeat but sometimes, you have fewer musical technical challenges. Sometimes the struggle is as much physical as ... It's definitely a bummer that you probably don't have the same gusto to make the JP Honk gig.

Tom:

I just can't march anymore. I can't walk that far. I've tried to get to a couple practices and I'd love to do that more. I've always put a lot of stock in stamina and now that I'm out of it I learn why I put a lot of stock in it.

Kirk:

I hear you. Right now, relatively compared to you a young spry guy. When I do my tuba dancing, of course there's definitely this Ohio farm boy and that marching band toughness, any weather, Salvation Army Christmas kettles, hours at a time and now it takes its form of, going to be out there dancing I don't care that I'm wearing a 25 pound piece of metal, I'm going to be swinging it and moving everything around.

Tom:

You ever play a real bass?

Kirk:

A string bass? No, I took some lessons on a bass guitar and I understand the theory of it, but I never did it for real.

Tom:

Say doubles in brass but you didn't double in strings.

Kirk:

If I had a couple extra hundred bucks, $700 bucks to spend, maybe get a bass ukulele, have you seen these things?

Tom:

Yeah.

Kirk:

They're tiny but the stings are these beautiful rubbery ... It's so gentle compared to a harsh metal bass guitar sting. It sounds exactly like a full, upright bass. It's a beautiful thing. I was thinking, maybe I should -

Tom:

Get into a ukulele band.

Kirk:

I'm sorry, what was that?

Tom:

Get into a ukulele band.

Kirk:

Yeah! I know enough people who have gone the other way but I should maybe step up and expand my horizons a little bit from being just the tuba guy.

Tom:

Dan, my son Dan plays bass and somebody asked him, "Why would you want to do that?" He said, "Well, you're in charge of the rhythm, you're in charge of the harmony. Why *wouldn't* you want to do that?"

Let's talk about politics for a bit. Is it fair to say you're on the liberal side of things, lefty?

Tom:

Totally.

Kirk:

Has that always been the case? Was that the case growing up? How is that in terms of that environment?

Tom:

My mom ran for schoolboard in the early 50s, this was again in South Georgia and when Brown vs Board of Education came down, they very calmly said, we'd better make a subcomittee. That was enough. The state attorney general was threatening prosecution because it was against the law in the state of Georgia to even think of it anywhere in the schools. A lot of hangup phone calls, people calling us at all hours. They never let me know how much was going on, but I knew a lot of what as going on so anyway... short story, my dad grew up in Florida, but from a Boston family and they always thought of themselves as a Boston family but they were from Florida. So it's just by reason of being half way attentive, he was a liberal, it wasn't instinctive reaction to anything.

When the Klan was harassing my mom, even though they didn't let me know all that was going on, I knew something was going on. I just came to think that way. It's been really surprising sometimes that some subject comes up and I just come out with the liberal view on it. I never thought about it or anything else but I think of it as: there are people who think about politics, and people who don't about politics. The ones that do, they were all Liberals! ... kind of self serving.

Kirk:

Yeah, I'm definitely leaning left but, I have this joke I want to be 'an extremist moderate' but that's not the case. I definitely lean left but I do try to do ... Over the past couple years especially, I've been coming more aware of almost the tribalism of some of the beliefs on both sides and I recognize that some of the views I hold that aren't ... I like to think they are just pure rationality and empathy and all the things that I do associate with the best types of liberalism but also just because it's kind of what's expected to be among, to be with my peer group. I think there's a lot of that on both sides.

The other thing in terms of talking with some of the more either libertarian or sometimes just plain right-wing friends, sometimes it does come down to different starting assumptions. Sometimes there is a lot of logic in what they say if you started from the same place they did. I guess the idea is to wear the moccasins, to quote the old bad proverb. You also have to start where they started walking because that does make a lot of things ... For me right now, my current favorite thing to poke my finger at is this type of fundamentalism, which especially this country is often religious but also can be doctrinaire. I would say communists in Russia were just as fundamentalist about what it must be ... It's the idea of putting doctrine in front of people and thinking that you have the answers even when the questions haven't been fully formed.

Tom:

Well, I was coming into awareness when McCarthy was taking on the stars. I said, "I'm not going to have an ideology", it's no good for you, it's a complicated way of being stupid. I never went off on any radical toots at all even in the 60's. I was marching with all of them... but from my point of view is, "Why ARE we in Vietnam? What advantage is this? How much difference did that make to the United States?" Not much.

Kirk:

You mentioned McCarthy and obviously you were around with Nixon and all that stuff. Is the stuff today particularly worse or is it just the thing of the moment?

Tom:

I think it's much milder now. I think everybody ... You've got a lot of right-wingers surfacing but I think of all the political scene as much more moderate thing, more reasonable than it was back then.

Kirk:

More reasonable?

Tom:

Yeah.

Kirk:

Wow. I have so many ... It's interesting what kind of effects media, especially social media tends to have. In my view, some of the specialized media. Now there's not just three networks that give you a roughly balanced view, you have ones that cater to a specific viewpoint so you never have to hear the alternate viewpoint or that moderate view. I hear so many friends that are, "Oh my God, end of the world" at every turn. It's reassuring to hear from your point of view, "No, things are what they are."

Tom:

I wouldn't say I've seen it all but I've seen a lot and it's kind of hard to get excited about things. Certainly, I think Obama is the best president we've had in a long, long time. He's certainly my favorite politician so there's an example of things... he's not going to do anything stupid. He's in politics, and sometimes things have have to happen...

[Interruption]

Kirk:

You were saying you liked Obama and that you thought he was a pretty good -

Tom:

Except for the international trade thing. That's the only thing where I'm not comfortable with. I do think that basically politics is a field of dispute over the distribution of the relatively rare resources. Liberal, conservative... it's all the same stuff they're trying to control and I just feel much more in line with the people who are trying to control things because they understand them rather than the people who don't know how to make things be the way they already understand. I don't think there's any point to being reactionar - "Make America Great Again". Which part of it did you like best? One of the things I really like about Facebook, is suddenly getting in touch with people you went to high school with. Since everybody I went to high school with is very reactionary and most of them are ... Anybody who lives down there is cut off from the universal discourse of the rest of the country.

It's fun to sort of joust with them, they don't have an answer to it. They never changed - they stick these little memes and things out there and see 2000 polls and that's the last we hear of that... Let me try another one. I think they sometimes feel like they have a tiger bone tale but they should feel that way. I might have the advantage of being a Georgia boy and I understand the way they think. That's fine. I've become aware of living with my brother. I'm not a literal country but I lived in a small town. He lived there for awhile but basically he's in suburban Atlanta, childhood, not a dirt road childhood like I had. He doesn't have... he's not a country boy, and compared to most people I am.

I looked at a picture the other day, I think I must had it since I cut my hair short. I thought I couldn't have a beard if my hair was too long but when I cut my hair short, I grew so that would have been in - '75 or something like that. There's a picture of I was looking at the other day, there's a great, bushy black beard.

Kirk:

The reason is I was going by pictures, I just noticed when I first started this beard, this was only 6 years ago, It really wasn't as dominant grey as it now is. Now I see all these weird stripes where it's not completely grey but sometimes ... Actually I think I' thnking like maybe in a couple decades, give or take a pair of glasses, your look is what I might be aiming for.

Tom:

I read an article about Wolf Blitzers beard, because he had a makeup department. His has gotten down to the same length... I have one of those offset shaver deals and had it at the closest cut but I often thought, particularly recently, is go to the barber just for a beard trim because my hair doesn't grow as fast as it used to. With the trimmer, I can't get it as even as it seems to promise it would do but I think I would like to have it be much shorter. I've always thought of it as a layout type problem. To have some weight because I have a round face. You want to have some weight on the bottom half.

Kirk:

Actually, my concept, maybe again with the round face was ... It's nice to have some lines on it. My face is all curves, having a little bit of contrast or some lines. Sometimes you try to emphasis with the chin. I'm not even there, I'm just trying to ... Not make the neck look too scruffy and come over here and just kind of -

Tom:

There was a guy I was talking to about his beard, his sideburns came down to a point and he had this little narrow, quarter of an inch wide -

Kirk:

Yeah.

Tom:

I just don't have the patience.

Kirk:

Yeah, it seems like a lot of sculpting. It's great, your hair is a strong look... Right now, my beard is kind of grey, your beard is grey, It'd be a little harder to see. You need that darkness to really pull it off.

Tom:

Every once in awhile, I think what if I shaved it all off.

Kirk:

As a tuba player, I think of that more often sometimes. I've gone a week or two without trimming and so I have this extra thing and I have a really hard session, a couple hours of playing away, I'm like, "Ow, that kind of hurts.".... but Vanity, vanity.

When you were in the Salvation Army, were you under a lot of pressure to be a Salvationist?

Kirk:

It didn't read as much as pressure just because ... Especially because my parents were ministers and in a way I think I really wanted to be a good christian Salvationist kid. My parents are pretty liberal, as far as they could be in terms of that tradition but I think I might have instilled a sense of, frankly, hellfire and damnation ... that if you don't fly right, you're vulnerable for eternal punishment and I think that's one of the reasons why I'm sort of in my head, the rationalistic guy I am, because subconsciously I'm going to be held to account for what I do - my actions - but I can always justify it by what it seemed to be at the time. That's that defensive mechanism. I tend to be very, sometimes lost and out of touch with my gut and then in touch my head with this stuff because of that.

For what it's worth, my religious journey was then ... When I was a teenager realizing, well, here I am trying to be a really good Christian kid but if instead of being the sweet talking son of a preacher man, I was the sweet talking son of the imam, would I be trying just as hard to be a good moslem?. That turned out to be the main thing to me, subconsciously. Now as a post-modern-influenced existential guy - it's this need to be objectively correct or as close to being as objectively correct as I can be because that seems cosmically important to me. The realization that my religious upbringing and what I held to be true wasn't super fundamentalist, and I tried to reconcile it: If you look at genesis not as a science textbook but as a poetic way of describing planetary development, that kind of stuff, it's fairly easier. Even my efforts to do that were influenced by my need... I realized they were culturally constructed and so that meant that it wasn't true in the way that I needed it to be true necessarily. I was trying to be a good Sunday school kid. Not to be too crude but to get to second base with a gal, I would do it but I would feel *guilty* about it.

I had other friends who seem to have less of a spiritual questioning but doing more of that 'party' stuff. I don't know if it was jealousy or what but I was like, well that can't be right. Also, every year like clockwork, I'd go to the Salvation Army music camp, the wider regional one and it was really odd to me. The first Sunday, we'd have a church meeting, an ok church meeting, and the second Sunday, they would have another church meeting, often with the bigger guns preacher or whatever, an important guest... but *every* year like clockwork there was a big kind of pseudo-revival ... the Salvation Army has a tradition of the "alter call" and the idea is at end of the meeting you're often presented, you know, if you feel the need to get right with God, come to the front. It was small group ministering, one person alone or a small group would get the attendants of the church and they'd talk it over, very cathartic. Now, as a sophisticated guy, I can see the value of that from a psychology point of view but back then it was like, "I think God should move in more mysterious ways than this." In terms of the clockwork aspect of every year, not the first Sunday, the second Sunday is the big ...

Those three things meant to me that my religion that I grew up with wasn't the objectively, universally, provably true as my sort of half science / half-... not fundamentalist, half-hard core christian, needed. It needed to be true, true, true and it wasn't. Since then, I sometimes second guess that because I was rebelling against a straw man, or very brittle faith and I do understand the value of certain traditions for people. Again, I don't think I was hardcore atheist like 'no way' but I do realize, at least for awhile I was hanging more with the UU church, and I can understand the value of the process and the questioning.

Tom:

My dad was a Unitarian and took up with the Atlanta Unitarian church.

Kirk:

You were saying Boston Unitarian too?

Tom:

Boston Unitarian -

Kirk:

My understanding is I'm not sure if that was before the merge... before U became UU... but I've been led to understand that in other parts of the country, it's closer to the Anglicans, whereas in this part of the country it's more of you accept vary many traditions and look for that value.

Tom:

Oh yeah. That's true but on the other hand, it's just like Unitarians up here, it's not Methodist, Presbyterians, it's just another church. Unitarians elsewhere is a collection of rebels, comparatively speaking.

Kirk:

I hear what you mean. Here, if you go inside a church, especially around Arlington, Cambridge you get some liberal congregationalists or whatever- it's probably as open to different people, from sexualities, to different everything, to different viewpoints, a little more openness. Sometimes the UU, in my experience, in a way that I have not seen in other christian derived churches, you get this idea of maybe the Buddhists have something to say to us, maybe the Hindus, maybe the Muslims. It's even more multi-path, many ways kind of thing.

Tom:

It just dawned on me about age 14....this all bullsh-

Kirk:

It's a good age.

Tom:

This was when I really came into it, it wasn't a really big spiritual crisis or anything like that - but I used to believe it, then some youth pastor or somebody was laying some kind of religious thing on me...

Kirk:

I admit in my heart of hearts I respect people more when (around the same age I did, self servingly) they had the same kind of spiritual about face. Whether they became more religious or less religious, I respect it more when their belief happens to be the exact same thing they grew up with as a pre-teen. I just think that's an important time when you need to look around and think about what is going on? and what is really true?

Tom:

I was amazed when they moved to Atlanta. Dad started going to church. I was really surprised so I used to go to church with him sometimes, and Martin Luther King spoke at his church -- and this was in Atlanta. I heard him speak there, this was before he was famous but he was certainly a known personality at the time. I was very impressed! ...and I still got that. I don't have much religion anymore but I certainly believe in the power of a preacher. It used to be ... South Georgia Methodist, you had someone with thunder, who would really lay it down. I remember one thing - which I now understand it as nothing but a technique - but he was talking about puppies and something like that. He asked why I was sad that bad things happened to puppies? Why are you sad about the puppies and not about your own immortal soul? Are you sad about that? Etc.

Again, does this make any sense?

Kirk:

Yeah, yeah. They go too much for the gut and not for the head.

Tom:

We used to have a Salvation Army college in my neighborhood in Chicago.

Kirk:

Do you think that's what they called a 'training school', for the ministers?

Tom:

Yeah.

Kirk:

Yeah, okay. That makes sense.

Tom:

Isn't everybody a minister in the Salvation Army?

Kirk:

No, it's not quite ... As far as I know, that's the shtick of the Mormons. Where everyone is ordained. The Salvation Army calls its ministers officers.... The regular people who just attend, roughly like the Catholic 'confirmed', they become 'soldiers'. They're considered soldiers and there are officers. Sometimes I like to call it the 'goofy paramilitary wing of the Methodists'...they just took a a metaphor and the idea of a 'war against sin' and took it to a logical extreme. If you're thinking of a college, I'm guessing it would be a school for officers training... the Salvation Army divides the country into four territories and Chicago would be a different territory. I know the eastern territory, which is actually the northeast, so I can't confirm that, but it sounds about right.

Tom:

Spiffy uniforms.

Kirk:

Yep.

Tom:

Very spiffy uniforms and badges.

Kirk:

It's funny how that became ... When it started, that was a way of making a very egalitarian thing, everyone wears the same thing. You don't have to wear your Sunday best and as the Salvation Army lost some of its blatant gun ho-ism... it used to be, thinking of the Save-A-Soul mission of "Guys and Dolls". It used to be more consuming, sort of how I think of as the Jehovah Witnesses or Mormons going on missionary duty. As far as I can it's sort of mellowed and isn't quite as street praching as it used to be. Back when it was, uniforms were egalitarian, but now those are the people who are hardcore about the church versus other people who would just show up in their usual, relatively nice clothes.

It's funny. Parts of it... the theology is a little bit right wing. Not theology... but my mom is one of the few liberal democrats and there's some issues she and I not agree on, but they are mostly onboard with assuming everyone in that place is republican - at the headquarters and other places. There's definitely that affiliation she's sad about. That's one thing I've gotten the hang of lately. Christian Folk Protestantism, American Folk Protestantism or Folk Christianity, less so the Catholics in my untrustworthy view.

Tom:

It's a different deal.

Kirk:

Let's say Christianity where most of them are Protestants. As a guy who grew up, again kid of a preacher, and learned a fair chunk of bible stuff-- the amount of Biblical stuff ... The people I argue with sometimes who think they're coming from the true bible standpoint, it so much is this reactionary staus quo preserving, this is what we think but we're also using this holy book that we're going to say inerrant, protected by God, tells you everything you need to know and that we're also faithful to it's lessons -- and just ignoring two thirds of it. I respect people more who are potentially, even if they don't live in their heads, able to justify things intellectually and on paper and stuff, and these people never even get to that point. They never question, they never ask. They just kinda believe.

Tom:

Even though I completely got out of it, but I've always been glad that I was into it because it's very educational to know what's in the Bible and what people believe and all of that. I've always been glad that I knew a lot about religion. I wasn't in it at all but just to know the way religious people believe and all the cultural differences that are pretty much gone out of normal American life now. Daniel in the Lions' Den, that sort of thing... that was just common currency, when I was growing up. Nobody talks about Daniel as far as fundamentalist protestants do. Baptists are my favorites - got out there before Jesus even came along. Jesus before Jesus.

I want to get back to the theoretical justification for this really lovely dinner - Thank you very much for it. Do you think the experience with Ann, did that change how you viewed your own potential ends or how you feel about it or is it ... It's okay if no, I'm just shooting it out there.

Tom:

No, no, no. It's just a penetrating questions.

Kirk:

Okay.

Tom:

Friends and I were in a band, and they had a song called immortality. "Immortality, immortality, feeling your heart that you're not going to die" - I never thought that.

Well, it took so long so it wasn't a shock when she died it just took a long time. Like I said, we had a lot of fun all along.

Kirk:

Roughly how old was she when she had the stroke and then five years -

Tom:

Oh Lord, she was -

Kirk:

Ballpark.

Tom:

She was 71 when she had the stroke, she had a few years later.

Kirk:

I had just forgotten the timing. At least it wasn't a 'cut down the prime of youth'.

Tom:

No. Not at all. We had a rich, full life with kids, grandkids, she had all those experiences and traveling. So I certainly miss her. She was funny as hell. Funny as hell.

Kirk:

That's absolutely one of the strongest points of my current sweetie, I say current, every love is going to be forever, right? That's the only reason you're in love. My sweetie Melissa is really funny, it's a really great quality.

Tom:

We were going through a bad patch one time, she was seeing a counselor or therapist, and the therapist said at one point, "You're having all of these problems, why do you stick with him?" "He makes me laugh."

Kirk:

That is - literally - my dads epitaph. "He made us laugh" is the thing.

You can use any of this you want in any way you want. I'd just like to see it-

Kirk:

Yeah, yeah, yeah and you would have, whatever the word is when you can say no. It's interesting to think about what I might do with it in terms of, actually, I've never tried to transcribe something as long as this lovely conversation. I know sometimes what I've done in the past, we have to cut out the um's and the uh's, the important thing is to get the message and take slight liberties without taking too much liberty.

Tom:

I had long interviews with people when I was a reporter. At least in one case I hired a transcriptionist to write it all down for me. That helped a lot. She got rid of the um's and things like that automatically and what was left was pretty much the substance - if you want to make something out of you might ant to go with that. I was going to show you but then I forgot to bring it with me, I got this Kindle reader and your book was on it and I booted it up -

Kirk:

Oh the comic book? Is it black and white or is it color?

Tom:

Black and white.

Kirk:

When I ported it over I realized they compressed the images a bit and I'm afraid my aritist would say it wasn't doing justice to his work. When you look at the print version or the online version, he cares for the coloring and they compressed it a little bit but still, I like the message with that, the book. Even when I remade it into a comic, I was too afraid to edit it and I think I ended up making it too much of a sacred document. At one point I ahd this eleventh grade English Teacher. I wrote an essay and she loved it and I edited and then she's like, "Now it's terrible." I'm always too slow to edit myself. Again, I wrote a lot of that when I was in my mid to young twenties. Do you think it holds up and makes some sense, in terms of where I come from?

Tom:

It was sound and entertaining and, what more do you want?

Kirk:

I tell you, I'm thinking about making another comic book. This one is going to be a sequel to my one comic, "Young Astronauts in Love" which is recapitulating my own romantic college and high school experience and also just because it has that one panel where it has two astronauts embracing and all you see as their faces move closer is the clunk and that's young astronauts in love and the mechanical difficulties, I guess, is the joke there. There are a few ideas, philosophies that I'd like to ... The message I'd like to spread to the world is for that subset of the world who are as uptight about death as I was, and sleepless nights and paranoid, and like 'Ahhh!'. This very odd, surreal feeling of how could I possibly end, how could this perspective end and life still go on? A certain subset of people, me at least, have had this time in their life where that seems really bizarrely scary and strange and hard to deal with. I think getting those ideas down on paper really helps soothe me through there. Anyways, that's the message I'd like to get to the world.

The other message that is more lately is it starts with a line from Nietzsche... I try not to be one of those fans of Nietzsche but he talks about glad term 'Amor Fati' The concept of love of ones fate. Sometimes I think about it as love of the circumstance and the way I'm thinking about it and I'm trying to think if I can get it into a comcbook without getting too preachy, and still put it in a story - is this idea of our monkey brains are so good at coming up with alternate universes that are just like this one, enough so we recognize every bit of it, but it's a little bit nicer. The parallel universe that's exactly like this one but I'm not stuck in fucking traffic or this one line at the grocery is not taking fricking forever or whatever small inconvenience that we have and tend to blow out of control. We're so good at thinking of those alternate worlds that it makes us miserable. For me, the call of "Amore Fati" is to embrace this current circumstance because it is THE circumstance, it is what exists. It's related but not quite the same as sometimes looking to the polyanna silver lining to everything - that can be a part of it but doesn't have to be, in my hopes for it.

One part that's always there which is kind of overlapping the silver lining idea, Kurt Vonnegut in this book "Cats Cradle", he outlines a sort of last rights that people in his made-up religion would say to each other and part of it is basically like: there was God and God got lonely so God made mud and he said this to mud, "Sit up, look around, look at all the things I've done." Now as mud prepares to go back to sleep, I look around and I think, "Wow, good job God. I certainly couldn't have done that. It's really amazing!" The idea of being sitting-up-mud or specifically the relatively tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of physical matter in this universe that got to be aware of what it was. That sometimes ties into a part of Amor Fati, that regardless of the pain and inconvenience of life of the moment, combined with the awareness of the pleasant life I've lived with a lot, I recognize as an uptight, liberal male, my straight white male privilege that I've enjoyed, all that stuff, that's a story for another time.

Tom:

It's not THAT strange.

Kirk:

They're all a part of it but also because it is that we can love it and it's a better life when we do love it. Again, I try to avoid shoulds like, "Oh, you should love it." Shoulds usually get in a bad place but you CAN, so you might as well and if I get a second tattoo besides my goofy little running alien eyeball character, if I get a second one, again probably equally as wussy and not out in people's face, it might be someway of trying to capture Amor Fati or the circumstance because having that as a physical reminder to myself ... Sometimes it's as simple as, "AGGH TRAFFIC" or as Homer Simpson put it, "Grr, lousy minor back, this world sucks!" That is such a perfect reminder to myself to not be like Homer in that case. It's so easy to think 'this world sucks!' because of this momentary whatever. Anything that helps you get beyond that and really love the circumstance I think is a good thing.

To be able to laugh things off is a great privilege. You can't laugh everything off... ...My mom lost a child and it really fucked her up.

Kirk:

How old was the child?

Tom:

3 days. Was not going to live, but anyway.

Kirk:

Had she had children at that point or was that the first?

Tom:

That would be her last child. She had 3 sons and this was the 4th, this was a girl. I don't think about it a lot but I'm certainly aware somehow or other it was a person and I never got to know that person.

Kirk:

I think with your mom, it's easy to forget for guys, maybe you think it's so strange, "women are these walking incubators for all these months" but also the intimacy you have with that person is a way that males won't understand because their physical experience is going to be different.

Tom:

All that stuff about feeling your stomach and feeling the baby moving around, it's your stomach, it's your baby. It made a big impression on me. It certainly must have been more profound for her.

Kirk:

Yeah.

There's a poem I should send you sometime or if you haven't seen it. It talks about second helping. I think it's probably an author who might have had an experience similar to yours and he feels he got that reprieve but he's also aware of what he calls a second life. He's having to take it a little easier and give up certain pleasures. In his first life he would get seconds at Thanksgiving and now for whatever reason he just goes for that one serving and you understand that it's the way it is. It's better than no second life at all I guess.

Tom:

Yeah. I never had or thought, "Wow, I really got to get a bucket list because I've gotten a reprieve here! - but I just thought as I look back, I didn't do that but I just enjoyed being alive and I still do.

Are you still with what I think you once referred to as the kind of crafts and smoking group?

Tom:

Ha, yes.

Kirk:

When you get around to crafts, what kind of crafts do you do?

Tom:

We mostly smoke! We have a shop in the basement. This one guy there who's actually artistic, he makes quite a few things. I just make conveniences, flower boxes and things like that. I got a bunch of plexi-bars and chopped them up into non-singing wind chimes... air chimes, sunlight chimes... It's really just a social engagement.

Kirk:

Actually if you don't mind the tangent, has smokin' been a good part of your life? Do you think you've gotten stuff from it?

Tom:

I quit smoking cigarettes when I had the flu, and after I recovered from the flu, cigarettes just tasted horrible, I stopped smoking them... Pot smoking, yeah. The thing is, it doesn't have all those bad physical effects that smoking and drinking have. There's no such thing as a hangover, at least I've never had one, so it's a pleasant overlay to the rest of your life. I like to get high, and read.

Kirk:

I have to be careful - I'm at the point where if I don't have my head in the right space, I will get that anxiety and that neurotic kind of thing.. The anecdote is one time, George W. Bush was using the terrorist threat levels as a political tool like, "Look over there, quick" and the threat level had been raised and I got a little baked and I was suddenly all uptight - "Maybe I am doing this enjoyable thing when I should be fleeing and I'm doing it to avoid fleeing!" I got neurotic and stuff like that. That's the closest equivalent that I've worried about in terms of hangovers and stuff like that.

Tom:

I've never had any paranoid feelings or anything. I've never been particularly interested in anything else. I took acid back back in the day when everybody took acid.

Kirk:

I was going to ask about that. Was that transcendental, was it amazing?

Tom:

I did that.

Kirk:

Did it change your outlook on life?

Tom:

Well, I think that meditating is practicing concentration, because that's basically what I do and I still do it every now and then just lean black, I close my eyes, concentrate on the eye in the middle of the forehead and it's pretty profound. I don't do it everyday or every week. I do it every year certainly but not all the time but it's another tool in my path.

Tom:

I like it, not concentrating on it or anything like that ... just goofing around. I did say that dying didn't make me want to accomplish things that I hadn't accomplished. It was another interesting experience... I didn't thnk, 'gee ya really gotta pull your socks up now buddy!' Socks still down.

One thing is for me, I've never had a strong, by myself desire to have kids. I think I've accepted that for certain relationships it might be par for the course and I think I would hopefully have stepped up to be that good father figure. As I think I might have shared, or maybe not, there's a lesbian couple, friends of mine, who asked me to be a donor. Have you heard this story?

Tom:

No.

Kirk:

Oh okay. There is a lovely little two year old running around who has my genes, half my genes, and half one of her moms genes. But she has two moms. I'm invited into that extended village in an uncle role, which I happily accept and I think is a very good fit for me based on how I've also been a virtual uncle for friends' kids. Being an only child, I can't be an uncle-uncle. I don't think I'll definitely be like, "Ah, crap. I wish I had [had kids]" but I think it's a unique treasure in my life to know what it's like to 'see your heart running around in someone else's body'. She's two, so the really interesting parts of person hood aren't even there yet.

Tom:

I wouldn't be so sure.

Kirk:

Yeah. That's true too. Every time I visit, which is about on average once a month roughly, I actually write a letter to her 15 or 16 year old self. Again, I tend to be a sort of retrospective guy and a little bit self absorbed, I can't deny that... It's funny. When I turn 22 or so or 23, my life is so much more documented that before then--

Tom:

How old are you?

Kirk:

I'm 42. The first half of my life is so much more unevenly documented than lately, over the past 16 years there's been a daily diary and then also blogging and now I'm discovering 20 years of photos, digital photos. It's funny because when I look back to my 15 year old self, of course it's really awkward when I read my diaries when I'm 15, I'm such a putz. I'm precocious and weirdly trying to wrestle these theological things and trying to be almost sanctimonious in some things but also still trying to get it on with a gal... The short is, I'm writing these letters to Cora, I like the term, super-niece. Instead of a "great niece", she's my "super niece" because depending on your perspective, genetically we're a little closer than a typical nephew-niece relationship. On the other hand socially, culturally, which I think is the important ways, it's decided that, no I am absolutely not a father. I am a donor, plus an uncle, so super-niece and super uncle is the term I like.

Tom:

Is she going to know about you?

Kirk:

Absolutely. In fact, from the initial negotiations and talks about exactly what we want it to be, both moms are on board and I was very fond of ... As soon as she was aware enough to ask the question, she would get the honest answer. With two lesbians, they want to make sure there are also positive male role models and figures and hopefully see what is a sense of manhood and a way of being a guy in the world. I was invited from that point of view. Lately, it's actually interesting, they said to me, "After a lot of talking, we decided we weren't going to make it a surprise", and go ahead and say things like, "Oh, you have your Uncle Kirk's nose", give little hints or suggestions that there is this connection here genetically even as the family and extended family is what it is and isn't what it isn't.

Tom:

Would you say - you're speaking intimately here with this test tube donation?

Kirk:

Roughly speaking, the turkey baster method. Not quite exactly that but for all intents and purposes, at home not using a lab, not going through that stuff but not involving a physical act of love, in quotes, but was just me providing them a sample and saying, "Okay, good luck you two. I'm off to New Jersey" and yeah. Over the course of the weekend, when some plotted fertility seemed like it would be high, it was literally before and after a weekend trip to New Jersey. The first extended weekend we tried it, it just happened pretty easily. We didn't have to go through a lot of expensive lab work or anything.

Tom:

She'll end up taking care of you, maybe some day.

Kirk:

I have to admit, I don't want to admit, that's not entirely off my radar like, "Oh someone who will give a shit about my life, when I'm really old." I don't want to put that on them. First of all, I think there are very bad reasons to be a parent-- You shouldn't be a parent A. As your retirement fund or retirement plan or B. As "company". Those are two things, in my judgement is not the best reason to be a parent. That said, the prospect of someone you've attached to and sort of have your back a little bit ... Obviously no one ever wants to be a burden to another generation and in this case I feel like I have less of a "moral claim" - and I guess moral claim isn't the right term, I'm not sure anyone shoud have a "moral claim". There's even less of that because I have avoided the work ... Actually the big thing I avoided was the moral responsibility of "Here's this big, uncertain world, maybe, from global warming to nuclear Armageddon, Mad Max situations that could arise, do I want to bring a kid into that?" And I was neurotic enough that I didn't want to make that big thing, like this is all my fault.

With my avoidance of that, along with that, I don't get all the benefits and perks of being a father because I'm not. I'm a donor and hopefully a good uncle. That said, if she wants to look out for me when I'm old and decrepit and she's still young and spry, I'm not going to say no, heh. I'm going to try to do less demanding of that than I might--

Tom:

There's no question of demanding that, but if you're certainly part of the family or not, you have more responsibilities than if you aren't in that circle... you attempt to be a positive influence in the things you say and so forth and so on, that's all that's happening and totally natural. I mean they did ask YOU. They admired your genes.

Kirk:

There are fewer greater compliments than that. I was at the top of a very, very short list of theirs and that is immensely flattering. It's a really lovely scene. It's funny. To other people who are like, "Let me show you a picture of my kid" I try not to be too much of that guy in terms of bringing up the at the drop of a hat, but it is something really special to me.

Tom:

She's going to be the high school valedictorian and you're going to be very proud.

Kirk:

As a two year old, she's wicked smaaahht right now so I have my hopes. It's funny too, people when they're young, one or two, there are some things that are being set in terms of the person, the adult she'll grow into. On the other hand I'm looking forward to when I can engage with her more intellectually and more thoughtfully. There's a funny cartoon I love. I'm not sure I'll describe it very well but it's basically a parent, an middle age man, showing a kid, "Here's Star Wars. Love this. Here's Back to the Future, love this. Love all this stuff. BE ME." There's a scary time that geeks, especially geeks but everybody must avoid in terms of trying to get their kid to confess that their generation was the best. It's weird. In some ways, pop culture sort of got stuck. Transformers the movie, GI Joe the movie, all this stuff that was big in the 80s. Pokemon is the current hot video game, it's past my generation, it's a few years younger than me but it's attempts ... Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, whatever.

Do you feel that at all? When I look at fashions and styles, you can tell the 50s from the 60s, the 60s from the mid 70s. Actually most of the decades start in the middle of the decade so mid-50s to mid-60s, 60s to 70s, 70s to 80s, 80s to 90s and then from 90s to 2000, mid-2000 to 2010s, it seems stuck. I could go to the Gap in 1997, get myself a pair of khaki's- maybe jeans, addmittedly waist bands have gone up and down a little bit but besides that, like a shirt? It feels like there's been a certain weird stability. Do you see this?

Tom:

I loved the Gap. I miss the Gap. That was my kind of clothes.

Kirk:

It's still around, right?

Tom:

I guess, but I don't shop there anymore. I have more clothes than I need. I don't know. I was seeing in the paper the other day that the guy in Garfield, the owner of Garfield -

Kirk:

Oh, Jim Davis, Garfield you said?

Tom:

Yeah. The character in the strip was also him, but he was dressed exactly like me, like I'm dressing now, how I dress today. This is all kind of new because I got these high socks and these shorts. I've never worn that before and I just looked and said, "Oh my God, I'm still in style."

Kirk:

There you go. There's some theory that says like, the Gap, it's weird, it's upscale brand Banana Republic and it's lowscale brand Old Navy but it made a certain type of middle class look achievable and in the 90's they advertised "Picasso wore Khakis" and "Einsteint work khakis". They made it a generic, rough look, it kind of stabilized things because suddenly everyone could look like aspirational middle class if they wanted to, and that was kind of enough.

It's interesting. I'm looking forward to seeing what you make out, if anything.

Kirk:

First of all, I have no idea how the audio on this is going to be. I didn't do a lot of testings or whatever or, "The audio is bad, I've got to get a real little radio mic or anything" hopefully it will come out okay. Maybe, I'll even consider what a commercial transcription service runs.

Tom:

I'd advise it because it would save you a lot of trouble...

Kirk:

As a guy who's been lucky enough fall into kind of the high tech field and also has a lot of projects on his mind, things that sacrifice a medium to small amount of money for a lot of time are usually a good trade off, I've found. It's very easy to get into false economy with that. Again, I shouldn't think of everything I want to do in terms of my hourly rate, like what my salary would be with my job, but it's not entirely an incorrect way of looking at things either.

Tom:

On the other hand if you're off at the beach and somebody's there typing away -

Kirk:

Yeah. That's also too the ability to appreciate time and enjoy wasting time. I read some interesting articles who I've totally forgotten, someone said "with every advance with technology, the tedium becomes more unbearable" and some of those things, that's true. We now can entertain ourselves in so many ways and be connected to people via social media on the go, all the time. Again, I've recognized this is not a new thing, recognized the idea that "this new thing is a thing to be poo-pood or "whatever is not new. In the 50's they thought, "Oh, my God we're boring ourselves with these magazines" or radio before then or even novels before then. Different generations, each one is worried that we're not pulling ourselves to a higher, influential purpose, we're just filling our monkey brains with whatever comes to hand. It's just a natural thing we do.

How did you get here?

Tom:

I drove.

Kirk:

Okay.

Tom:

I tried getting on without a car but you can't live in the suburbs without a car. I went six or eight months and -

Kirk:

Did you try any of the zip car stuff or do you just try the T?

Tom:

I tried to do the T, I never got to the point of having a card. I think when I was working, I had a super T pass because the job, they gave me a choice between having a super T pass and having a parking space.

Kirk:

Oh I see.

Tom:

I'd rather have the super T. I enjoyed that and I was getting pretty good at getting around and so forth. Living in the suburbs and getting from one un-Tconnected place to another, there's no damn T route that runs down Washington street.

Kirk:

I'm not sure if you heard, Zip-cars, like the rental ... I'm hauling my tuba around enough that I don't think it will be worth it...

Tom:

You have the largest possible instrument in the smallest possible car.

Kirk:

Yeah, I love that car. It's perfect enough for hauling around a tuba... It's kind of funny. It's not true because you ...

Kirk:

It's funny with a band. Last year, Marie and especially David, your son, were doing more leadership and David actually recognized -

Actually recognized he was getting a little burnt out. Between work and stuff he was not ... I've sort of stepped into that leadership vacuum a little bit. Everything from directing when we're there which is sometimes tough because I'm doing the basssline and I'm like, "Okay, can you do a solo?" -- It's frustrating to get around sometimes.

Tom:

I described it to somebody as a walking jam session.

Kirk:

What's that?

Tom:

Walking jam session.

Kirk:

That's right. That's the goal. So there's actually some people that are pitching in in terms of, especially figuring out gigs and stuff but other things ... Especially in terms of describing how the rehearsal went in emails I send out, doing that. It's been interesting trying to fill that leadership vacuum that our band always has. It catches me in my martyr complex, I think there's a part of me that wants to be shown as important so I tend to get myself into groups. I'm more attracted to groups where I know I'll be important. When I went to the UU that summer, I did not realize New England had this whole thing ... church attendance, in the summer a church that might be a running faucet turns into a little drip until the fall. I got there in the summer and I was like, "Oh, I recognize this, the little straggly church, hardly any people." Thinking I could maybe be important here, subconsciously at least and then the fall came and suddenly the spigot turned back on and everyone was there and I was like, "Oh, I'm not as important."

Sometimes that's good because it means I want to be reliable and crucial but on the other hand it's not as good because it means I want to be respected for being important kind of stuff. That's a personal struggle. All right. Should we head out?

Yeah it was, absolutely. Really good. The thing about the portion, probably only 1/5 of it is about the whole, your interesting story about the whole dying and coming back. The whole "zombie Tom" I'm dealing with in front of me. You don't have a hunger for brains or anything right?